Gu Family Book Quotes & Sayings

In any authoritarian society, the possessor of power dictates, and if you try and step outside, he will come after you. This is equally true of Sovietism, of China and of Iran, and in our time it has happened a lot in Islam. The point is that it's worse when the authoritarianism is supported by something supernatural. — Salman Rushdie

Let others probe the mystery if they can.
Time-harried prisoners of Shall and Will-
The right thing happens to the happy man.
The bird flies out, the bird flies back again;
The hill becomes the valley, and is still;
Let others delve that mystery if they can.
God bless the roots! -Body and soul are one
The small become the great, the great the small;
The right thing happens to the happy man.
Child of the dark, he can out leap the sun,
His being single, and that being all:
The right thing happens to the happy man.
Or he sits still, a solid figure when
The self-destructive shake the common wall;
Takes to himself what mystery he can,
And, praising change as the slow night comes on,
Wills what he would, surrendering his will
Till mystery is no more: No more he can.
The right thing happens to the happy man. — Theodore Roethke

But no matter how inspiring a dream maybe, a dream that cannot come to life stays a dream. — Simon Sinek

You've missed the bus. Are you calling in sick again? It's the second time in two years. The boss will frown upon it. — Benjamin R. Smith

Give the enemy not only a road for flight, but also a means of defending it. — Thomas Hardy

Parents who treat the teenager in the same manner in which they treated the child will not experience the same results they received earlier. When the teenager does not respond as the child responded, the parents are now pushed to try something different. Without proper training, parents almost always revert to efforts at coercion, which often lead to arguments, loss of temper, and perhaps, verbal abuse. Such behavior is emotionally devastating to the teenager whose primary love language is words of affirmation. The parents' efforts to verbally argue the teenager into submission are in reality pushing the teenager toward rebellion. — Gary Chapman

I don't feel any pressure to be funny at all. I'm funny because I want to be funny. I could sit here and be serious for an hour and you would go away and make me much funnier than I am. — Jim Carrey

If we had no faults we should not take so much pleasure in noting those of others. — Francois De La Rochefoucauld

It's hard to tell our bad luck from our good luck sometimes. And most of us have wept copious tears over someone or something when if we'd understood the situation better we might have celebrated our good fortune instead. — Sarah Ban Breathnach

As a father, he was generous. More or less. The "less" was because he never gave me what I wanted. He gave me only what he wanted me to have. I found this was often true with philanthropy and with love. The giver's desire and fulfillment played an important role. — Monique Truong

When the corpses are cleared no new order will emerge. Power, society, relationships, will descend in all their confusion on a new generation. The old, who started this conflagration, will retreat, worn out, the survivors and the young will continue the dance. — Rita Mae Brown

Everybody is continuously connected to everybody else on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Reddit, e-mailing, texting, faster and faster, with the flood of information jeopardizing meaning. Everybody's talking at once in a hypnotic, hyper din: the cocktail party from hell. — Maureen Dowd

I certainly don't advocate terrorism as a way of progressing and understanding people, nor do I believe labeling everything as a terrorist act is helpful either. — Hugo Weaving